The data storage industry is experiencing a boom fueled in part by aggressive cost reduction of data storage due to advances in storage technology, broadened international accessibility to the internet and World Wide Web, and the public's appetite to accumulate data. Unfortunately, with the boom has come associated undesirable activities, such as data attacks and data theft. Data stored in data storage libraries are among the primary targets of such attacks and theft.
Data storage libraries serve as data receptacles for a variety of clients including businesses, governments and the general populace. These libraries generally include drive storage devices adapted to read and write data to and from media which can be archived within the libraries. Traditionally, tape media has been used in many of the mainstream storage libraries due to the relatively high storage capacity and data integrity robustness of tapes. One advantage of utilizing tape media is its mobility which permits achievability in remote locations called “vaults”, thereby making an “on line” data attack difficult, if not impossible. However, should an attacker acquire a tape, the data stored on the tape may be subject to unauthorized access. In attempts to prevent unauthorized access, the tape, or other mobile media capable of being used in a data storage library, can be armed with a number of security measures including data encryption. One fundamental component of data encryption is the knowledge of how to decode or decrypt the data; such knowledge is known to those skilled in the art as a decryption key. In order to increase security of data, decryption keys can be changed from one data set to another frequently enough to instill sufficient confidence that the encrypted data is secure.
Managing a multitude of tapes containing encrypted data can be a challenge, especially if identifying information associated with a particular tape is lost or difficult to obtain. Generally, a tape cassette is identifiable by indicia means such as a bar code affixed to the cassette or tag attached to the cassette which indicia is confirmed by reading header information when the cassette is cooperating with a drive. The header information is originally set up by an Independent Software Vendor used by the client of the data and generally includes attributes about the tape and data stored thereon. Should the indicia means be lost or the header information be unreadable or inaccessible for any other reason (i.e., the header data is corrupted or the header data is encrypted and cannot be decrypted), the tape is marked as a “bad tape” which will require further user intervention often resulting in the tape being discarded.
In an effort to improve managing mobile media with encrypted data (within a library or vault, for example) both methods and apparatus are disclosed herein. It is to innovations related to this subject matter that the claimed invention is generally directed.